“It sure sounds nutty to me — but I’m listening.”
Simon shrugged.
“Being his son, I am a little nutty too. I went back up the Amazon where he had been — of course, it’s much easier today. I found the tribe he had visited, and the tree, which he described very well. I tried the nuts, which are so horrible that after one bite you would prefer the mosquitoes, but no mosquitoes came near me. Then I knew how I could make an honest living. Is that enough, and do we go for a picnic?”
“I suppose I should have my head examined,” she said inventively, “but this I have got to see. Only if it doesn’t live up to the billing, it could be the end of a beautiful friendship.”
“Agreed. At the very first bite of a bug, we shall throw everything in the lake and drive back to Antoine’s.”
But on the drive out to the place he had picked, she could no more resist pumping him with other questions than she could have cut out her own tongue. What was the tree? He didn’t know, he wasn’t a botanist. He’d simply gambled on having several tons of the nuts husked and powdered by cheap Indian labor, and rafted down to the coast at Belem, where he stored the sacks in a warehouse. But the pills? He’d taken a few pounds of the flour back to Europe, had tablets handmade by a pharmacist friend, even telling him that they were only supposed to be a kind of general tonic. However, he had decided that the pills could be most profitably manufactured and exploited in the United States, and he had been negotiating with four of the biggest drug companies.
“It has not been quite as easy as I expected,” he said. “You see, I couldn’t give them a regular formula, and I dared not give them samples to make their own tests, because they could analyze them, and your modern chemists are so clever that they might quickly find a way to make the same thing synthetically without even identifying the tree. So I had to make my own demonstrations and see that every pill I gave out was swallowed. It made many problems. But this company in Chicago was most interested.”
“Then what brought you to New Orleans?”
“I’d also wondered about starting a small factory myself, and I thought I might be at home here with its Continental traditions. That is why I was talking to Mr Stern. But when I went back to Chicago, these people were ready to discuss a deal, and I decided it might be wiser to let them have the headaches with the Government and the unions.”
“But Mr Stern must have told you who I was, after he introduced us the other night.”
“Yes, naturally.”
“And you never told me a word about it.”
“We were too busy, weren’t we?” he quoted her naughtily. “And if I had started trying to sell you my pills the first moment we were alone together, what would you have thought?”
She had no reply to that, but her active mind kept on working all the rest of the way to the place where he took her. Beyond any doubt he had the kind of presence and personality she had sometimes dreamed of, but she had not created and become the queen-pin of Ashville Pharmacal Products merely by dreaming.
When he stopped the car, she got out at once and strolled and stood around while he deftly and cheerfully set up lanterns, unfolded chairs and table, and unloaded boxes of utensils and provender. It was indeed a lovely spot, cool and clean-smelling, framed in ancient trees bearded with Spanish moss, with the dark mysterious expanse of Lake Pontchartrain lapping sleepily up to the shore and a round yellow moon rising high, but all she was interested in was the insect life.
Innumerable flying things fluttered and dived drunkenly around the lamps, and from the shadows came myriads of mosquitoes with a ceaseless hum of tiny tireless wings. She could even see them flickering speckily past her eyes, and hear the rise and fall of individual hungry hoverings around her, while even tinier gnats whined thinly past like diminutive rockets. But not once did the whine build into the typical infuriating crescendo of a gnat’s kamikaze plunge directly into the earhole, and she could watch her bare gleaming arms without seeing them darkened by the settling of a single mote of disrespectful voracity. Her expectant shoulders and back and legs waited for the hair-touch of an almost weightless landing and the microscopic stab of the first probing sting, but time went on and they felt nothing. And she knew that to be first on the market with a pill that would accomplish such a miracle would make what by any standards could be literally called a fortune.
There was soft music coming from the portable players and he was spooning caviar onto the first plates on the neatly laid table.
“Come, Elise, sit down and relax,” he said. “You know by now that nothing is going to bite you.”
“It’s amazing,” she said as she let him seat her. “I must know — did those pill makers give you a good deal?”
“Not too bad,” he answered with no embarrassment. “It will be a royalty of ten cents a hundred, with a guarantee of fifteen thousand dollars a year, and they pay ten thousand at once for the stuff I have in Belem — that is, if there is no hitch.”
“How do you mean? Isn’t it signed yet?”
“The president of the company has to give the final okay, and he’s been on vacation in Honolulu. He will be back tomorrow, and it will be one of the first things they put up to him. They wanted me to wait, but I told them I had a date here that I could not break. Anyway, they can phone me, and I can fly back in a few hours.”
“They’re robbing you,” she said intensely. “I’m a pill maker myself, and I know. If your pills are worth anything, they’re worth twice as much. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll double their offer right now.”
The cork popped from the bottle he was working on. “Please,” he said with a gesture. “No vinegar.”
“Baloney. If you won’t give me a business break, you’re robbing me as well as yourself, and that’d make anything sour.”
“But I’ve practically given my word—”
“They haven’t given theirs, have they? They can still back out and not owe you a nickel. So if they can’t close a deal because somebody’s on vacation, that’s their bad luck. Be an American business man. Send ’em a wire tonight and tell ’em all bets are off.”
“Elise, suppose you are only talking from the Martinis, or the moon, or because you like me a little? Suppose in the morning you wake up and decide you have been foolish? You tell me all bets are off. Then where am I?”
“You don’t know me very well, Buster, but I get your point. All right. When we get home, I’ll give you my personal check for twenty thousand. You take it to the bank as soon as they open—”
“And they immediately call the police.”
“Not with the note I’ll give you. There’ll be a code word that tells them it’s okay. And then right away you put in a long-distance call to Chicago and tell those jerks you already made a better deal. We’ll talk to my attorneys about the contract later in the day. Is that good enough for you?”
It was easily as good as anything he could have proposed himself, but he let her spend most of an exceptionally delightful meal selling it to him.
When Mrs Elise Ashville let herself wake up by sybaritically easy stages the next morning, and finally focused her eyes on the bedside clock, it showed ten minutes past eleven.
She squirmed, yawned, stretched, and sprawled again in the enormous bed, draining the last raptures of sleepy recollection, until she suddenly realized that some faint sounds of activity in the apartment should have aroused her somewhat before that. Either the new maid was going to prove as unreliable as her predecessors, or she was a potential jewel who crept in and moved around like a mouse.